The Beatles' Solo Careers Poll - Voting and General Discussion Thread

christ he's made a lot of garbage

I'm insufferable because I pointed your list wasn't complete? Okay! No doubt there's several McCartney tracks that aren't very good, but the best stuff is worth it. Same goes for Lennon and Harrison.

I listened to Liverpool Sound Collage a few years but had forgotten about it -- glad to have the reminder, this is good.

Super Furry Animals were heavily involved with that, iirc.

mccartney's live albums are all p much garbage

i listened to Venus And Mars for the first time recently and got Monster hives: a big-sounding studio record made almost solely for the functional purpose of propping up a worldwide tour extravaganza that sounds totally hollow outside that context (the title squib is nice though)

I disagree. Venus and Mars is top tier Wings record and a worthy follow-up to Band on the Run. Wings at the Speed of Sound (the clue is in the title) was definitely made as an album to justify the tour, and it shows in places, although half the record is classic Wings.

nice work shakey! cross-checking my list against yours, i might have just a few goodies left to add. the big miss is probably Helen Wheels which was only belatedly added to Band on the Run.

oh that is weird! That should definitely be on there. I wonder if I deleted it by mistake or something

I must've been looking at a British track listing or something?

It wasn't on the UK version of Band on the Run, so it's possible!

Okay - I think this really is the last of it, though my knowledge of 90s-00s b-sides and stuff is pretty hazy. I put *** next to ones I think people who like McCartney solo stuff but haven't gone beyond the albums should definitely check out. In general I do think he drew some kind of line between "good enough for album filler" and "not" - - - a lot of these have incredible riffs or main hooks but it's obvious they're missing some element (a bridge, a chord change) that would really make them special.

PAUL MCCARTNEY MISCELLANEY/MOP-UP

1970s

1882
A Love For You ***
Best Friend
Boil Crisis ***
Country Dreamer ***
Did We Meet Somewhere Before?
Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance
The Great Cock and Seagull Race
Helen Wheels ***
Henry’s Blues
Hey Diddle ***
I Would Only Smile
Jazz Street
Lunch Box – Odd Sox
Mama’s Little Girl
Night Out
Robber’s Ball ***
Rode All Night ***
Same Time Next Year ***
Soily ***
Sunshine Sometime
Thank You Darling
The Mess
Tragedy ***
Waterspout ***
Zoo Gang (Theme) ***

1980s

Atlantic Ocean
Blue Sway
Bogey Wobble
Christian Bop
Don't Break the Promise
Hanglide
I Love This House
It’s Not True
Lindiana ***
Love Mix
My Big Day
On The Way
P.S. Love Me Do (the nadir)
Return to Pepperland ***
Squid ***
Tough on a Tightrope
Twenty Fine Fingers aka Twenty-Five Fingers
Twice in a Lifetime
Write Away
Yvonne ***

1990s

All My Trials (trad.)

2000s

I’m Partial To Your Abracadabra (Dury)
Maybe Baby (Holly)
Summer of ‘59 ***

Linda McCartney - Wide Prairie

"i got up" and "the light comes from within" are both fun and would have worked on "white album, vol. 3" if they had stayed together and got around to doing that.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much everything - I can't think of anything else not yet mentioned. There could well be, though!

(xpost)

Good luck, guys.

Doc are those all (generally speaking) non-album tracks?

i wonder how long it would take to listen to all of these tracks. i recently had a bunch of long-distance drives i was doing and i ended up listening to every beatles album in order over the course of a few days -- tbh it was kind of startling to realize how little time it took to listen to everything they recorded. (confirmed my old suspicion that revolver is their finest hour.) feel like i'll at least need to try to listen to all the major stuff here to even begin to know what to vote for.

there's some tracks on this posthumous lennon release that i don't think got released anywhere else -- side 2 is all walls & bridges outtakes but i think side 1 might qualify for the poll:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlove_Ave.

huh yeah I got some of those because I think they appeared on other reissues, but was missing:

Here We Go Again (I don't think I've ever heard this? off to youtube...)
Rock 'n' Roll People

this is actually p interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4_6P6Z_acw

Re: my Macca list: a decent number are unreleased, bootleg-only cuts that I meant to keep separate but got tangled in somewhere along the way, maybe once I saw that you were counting never-released things like "Suicide." "Soily" and "The Mess" were live only, but got released on Wings Over America and as the b-side to "My Love," respectively. "P.S. Love Me Do" was concert warm-up background music on some godforsaken tour, which I believe was also the principal purpose of the later Twin Freaks material (obviously better by orders of magnitude). Then there's a sprinkling of b-sides and/or things that were unreleased until they showed up on bonus editions of the albums (e.g. the "Paul McCartney Collection" CDs in the early 90s, and the more recent remasters which rescued a bunch of the Ram through Red Rose Speedway material). Several are soundtrack cuts or attempted soundtrack cuts - "Did We Meet Somewhere Before?" for example, is in Rock 'n' Roll High School (!) but didn't make it to the soundtrack LP. "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance" is from a TV special; "Zoo Gang" was a TV show theme. A bunch of the 80s ones were from the abortive sessions between Press and Flowers in the Dirt - some of those trickled out as 90s B-sides, for example "Squid" which is a really pretty instrumental.

Freelance Hellraiser toured as opening DJ with Paul, but I don't think Twin Freaks was conceived for him to just put on and have a smoke

I listened to Liverpool Sound Collage a few years but had forgotten about it -- glad to have the reminder, this is good.

― WilliamC, Wednesday, May 16, 2018 5:13 AM (one hour ago)

Super Furry Animals were heavily involved with that, iirc.

― Le Baton Rose (Turrican), Wednesday, May 16, 2018 5:20 AM (one hour ago)

one track is SFA remixing unreleased Beatles sessions, and IIUC the last track is Paul remixing what they turned in

also IIUC the Real Gone Dub track is a Youth solo joint, if anyone recompiles a mega-Macca list for voting

I noticed that about the Real Gone Dub track but left it in anyway in case Macca muttered over it at some point or something

I better see fuckin' "Press" on some lists!

my ballot is going to be so boring it'll seem like an AI made it

tragically, the "Paul Mcartney" appearing on Matt Berry's Rain Came Down is a convincing simulacrum played by Peter Serafinowicz, but he should be eligible anyway

tbh with some of these solo guest appearances things it was really hard to determine which tracks the ex-Beatle actually contributed to. Some of those albums Ringo played on for example (Nilsson, etc.), he's not the only drummer on the album, but it's basically impossible to determine which tracks are him and which are, say, Jim Keltner.

^^It's really Bernard Purdie

heh

does anyone want to volunteer to do images for this poll? I have no idea what to do

it's weird, but this album is def better than George's own 1974 album (Dark Horse) and it's almost all him + Keltner, Voorman etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvr9Y75SUVk&list=PLkJpdntodN-7gmwVIBgK77nvIg_pLE3_q&index=0

what's the album? the link is broken, at least for me.

just drafted, read back over, and saved to a .txt a truly dorky twenty-two song spree of blurbs on mccartney obscurities. best left unposted? a 100-song ballot does give one some room, but in a discography with "maybe i'm amazed," "jet," "no more lonely nights," "with a little luck," "say say say," and even "my brave face," "no more lonely nights," "take it away," "junior's farm," etc., etc., does anyone really need to add "morse moose and the grey goose" to their pre-ballot listening?

Splinter "The Place I Love". Splinter is just two vocalists/songwriters that George signed to his label. He produced the whole thing, with his usual cadre of sidemen (Keltner, Voorman, Billy Preston, Willie Weeks, etc.)

xp

best left unposted?

if not here, where

rec.music.beatles in 1998

"No More Lonely Nights" = one of Paul's very best, with Gilmour's best session solo.

but yeah maybe i'll wait til after your "hi hi hi"s and such have gotten their due. wouldn't want someone going "i keep hearing this paul mccartney is supposed to be a big deal, let me check out doctor casino's recommendations" and being instantly turned away by the likes of "mumbo" and "ode to a koala bear."

Hey Mumbo's kinda cool, imo. Also so far as yr list of obscurities goes A Love for You might make my ballot, if I make one. V worth hearing, tho Cold Cuts is mostly pretty middling.

Doctor Casino please post your annotated list, we can handle it, I promise :)

Oh yeah, cosign on that

"secret friend" is so good, the b-side of 'temporary secretary' (which i've never been able to get into). 'one of these days' , also from the mccartney II sessions, reminds me a bit of simon and garfunkel. they'll both be high up on my ballot, i think.

"Temporary Secretary" would've been a menace if it had been a bigger hit. I only had to endure it at indie disco bars in the early '00s.

I like "Somedays" off Flaming Pie, the first of several times where McCartney has addressed in song some of the negative aspects of fame and wealth: "Don't ask me where I found that picture on the wall/How much it cost or what it's worth."

Cool Baroque oboe part

I don’t think I’ve heard 85% of all of these

Temporary Secretary is so irritating. Dude you just made Check My Machine, but that doesn't make the album?

each anti-"temporary secretary" post just bumps it up a slot on my ballot

Five tracks from George Harrison possibly? I've got "Blow Away," "Love Comes to Everyone," "Faster," "If You Believe," and "Soft Touch."

We haven't accounted yet for the songs included on the musical discs that accompanied these books:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_by_George_Harrison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_by_George_Harrison_2